Advancement Schemes (Brainstorming)

When it comes to character advancement, I'm mixed. I love getting new doodads and "stuff" for my character to do; but I've always wanted something that made sense. However, most games are absolutely horrible at incentivizing downtime for advancement - there's always one more emergency to deal with, you never get downtime to heal and recover. There's also the idea of just creating the character you want to play, and then minimal character advancement after that point - however, those games don't ever seem to grip what a lot of players want.

Somewhere in the back of my head, there's a game brewing about playing mercenaries and troubleshooters, people who solve problems for people at the edges of society, probably using Cortex Plus (which powers Smallville, Firefly, Marvel Heroic). So I'll be using Cortex Plus lingo here.

I picture the game having three phases - planning for the mission, the mission, and civilian life. 

Planning for the mission is where the players generate the game session, preferably through email, where being given a premise by the GM, they set the obstacles and challenges. The better they know the problem, the less challenge it is worth. In short the players create the payoff for their characters. This is done preferably during email so the GM has time to prep some related materials, though I'm sure some GMs could just improv a session from spending 10-15 minutes.

The mission itself is your standard play session full of hijinks and chaos. 

Civilian life can be less stressful - this is where you spend those dice that the group generated during the mission phase, as well as any bonus dice generated during the mission per the GM's choice (or perhaps some sort of in-game action). Spend dice to advance your character, or spend dice to reduce stress/wounds taken. Each spend of dice is a scene where a character is highlight, and other characters can join in to assist.

Generating the payoff would look like the following, lifted liberally from Smallville:

• 2d6 - baseline difficulty, can be raised to any combination up to 2d12 (the hardest of all missions). 
• 1d6 - an obstacle that is known and with an in place countermeasure, "We don't need to worry about the access control system, I have a skeleton key card."
• 1d8 - an obstacle that is known, but will need to be worked around on the mission, "There's an access control system, but we're going to need to get a passcard from somewhere."
• 1d10 - an obstacle that is only vaguely known, "They have to have some sort of system in place to control what the access system is, but I don't know what it is."
• 1d12 - There's something unplanned that is going to happen. It is going to suck.

Once the mission succeeds - during the civilian downtime you get to work on your character, healing wounds, learning to skills, recovering your spirit. Mechanically, these involve dice rolls of the PC vs the GM.

The GM's dice pool is generated from the following:

• Stress: d4 + Stress Eliminated 
• Asset: d6+Asset Created/Modified
• Skill: d8+New Skill Rating
• Distinction: d10+New Distinction Rating
• Attributes: d12 + New Attribute Rating

The Player rolls a dice pool equal to the existing rating, or related skill and a number of dice from the payoff - note there is only one payoff pool for the party, so any dice spent are spent entirely. 

Advantages: The players will be in a better place to set the stakes of the challenges they'll face, and be in a position to screw themselves over. 

Disadvantages: Very easy to generate stress during a mission, could pose some some challenges if the characters aren't significantly advanced. 

I know I personally hate playing the character that will eventually someday if the game progresses far enough will be the character that I want them to be. So maybe a game where it is very much a case of "design the character who you want to play at the start of the story, and we will see where things go from there." Maybe something to work when generating the characters - Marvel Heroic had the problem of not having enough structure to hang character creation off of for a great number of people, "design the character that feels right to you and your table and here are some guidelines" apparently wasn't enough for a number of people.

Riffing off a theme: Experience Points

I apologize if this is something jargon rich/disjointed. I'm trying to capture ideas off a post-it note before I forget entirely what the coded phrases meant.

Rob Donoghue discussed a week and change ago a method for handing out roleplay and exploration rewards. It was a neat concept of ways to quantify what rewards a PC/party gets for doing stuff outside of beating things/people/animals up and taking their loot. While it has a strong D&D focus, at the end he mentions White Wolf and "I'd forgo levels in favor of rating things from 1-5 dots and just be a little more stringy about how they level up.

Historically, most of my gaming has been White Wolf in one form or another. However, I've always had issues with XP rewards, mostly because they scale too fast, and as my Exalted game demonstrated, my players are more than capable of slow playing to get more XP.

For every major plot element important to a particular character, group, campaign, etc, you write it down; and then you rate it from 1 to 5:

1 - Plot element is only important to a particularly character
2 - Plot element is only important to the group
3 - Plot element is lightly important to the campaign
4 - Plot element is moderately important to the campaign
5 - Plot element is critically important to the campaign

The five phrases are (and each one can only be accomplished once):

Opening (1xp) - The Plot Element is introduced into the game.
Trigger (2xp) - The Plot Element is afoot; first chance for the characters to delve into the plot.
Development (3xp) - Action is rising; further developments, investigations, and
Climax (4xp) - The decision is made to confront/vex/counter/fully engage the plot element
Resolution (5xp) - The plot element is brought to some sort of conclusion; for now.

The key element here is that the plot element is not a person/place or thing; it is something to be resolved; it is a challenge, a conflict, a mystery to be solved. It needs to be an action, so that if players want the more XP cookie, then they need to be moving stuff towards resolution.

As I look over this it looks like it would cause XP to given in large globs. The first 2-3 phrases can happen fairly quickly and grant anywhere from 6-30 experience points depending on how the session goes. However, one would presume that generally the Development phrase would last longer and be a bit of a dry spell for XP afterwards as they work through those phases.